| Challenge: | Prior research has focused on English monolingual models, but how these mechanisms generalize to non-English languages remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They analyze three multilingual LLMs to find out how they can generalize recall mechanisms . they find that subject enrichment is language-independent, object extraction is language dependent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better in multilingual contexts than in English models . the model is more efficient in multi-lingual context, but it is more complex in multilinguistic models compared to English models. |
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| Challenge: | Multilingual large language models (LLMs) exhibit factual inconsistencies across languages . authors identify two primary sources of error: insufficient engagement of reliable English-centric mechanism for factual recall, and incorrect translation from English back into the target language for the final answer. |
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Tracing the Roots of Facts in Multilingual Language Models: Independent, Shared, and Transferred Knowledge (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using low-resource languages, multilingual language models (ML-LMs) have been developed to transfer factual knowledge across languages. |
| Approach: | They ask how ML-LMs acquire and represent factual knowledge . they use a multilingual factual information probing dataset to investigate ML . |
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Tracing and Dissecting How LLMs Recall Factual Knowledge for Real World Questions (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have shown promising ability to perform commonsense reasoning. |
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Unveiling Factual Recall Behaviors of Large Language Models through Knowledge Neurons (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have underscored their exceptional reasoning prowess with natural language understanding across a broad spectrum of tasks. |
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Tracing Multilingual Factual Knowledge Acquisition in Pretraining (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yihong Liu, Mingyang Wang, Amir Hossein Kargaran, Felicia Körner, Ercong Nie, Barbara Plank, François Yvon, Hinrich Schuetze
| Challenge: | Large Language Models are capable of recalling multilingual factual knowledge, but most studies evaluate only the final model, leaving the development of factual recall and crosslingual consistency unexplored. |
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X-FACTR: Multilingual Factual Knowledge Retrieval from Pretrained Language Models (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Language models (LMs) capture factual knowledge by filling in the blanks of cloze-style prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a code-switching-based method to improve the ability of multilingual LMs to access knowledge and verify its effectiveness on several benchmark languages. |
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OWL: Probing Cross-Lingual Recall of Memorized Texts via World Literature (2025.emnlp-main)
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Alisha Srivastava, Emir Kaan Korukluoglu, Minh Nhat Le, Duyen Tran, Chau Minh Pham, Marzena Karpinska, Mohit Iyyer
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Revealing the Parallel Multilingual Learning within Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yongyu Mu, Peinan Feng, Zhiquan Cao, Yuzhang Wu, Bei Li, Chenglong Wang, Tong Xiao, Kai Song, Tongran Liu, Chunliang Zhang, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input; however, previous studies focusing on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning focus on using multiple languages. |
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GuideQ: Framework for Guided Questioning for progressive informational collection and classification (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Using a new multilingual dataset, we examine how LLMs can be used to represent factual knowledge across languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a methodology to measure the extent of representation sharing across languages by repurposing knowledge editing methods. |
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Do Large Language Models Know How Much They Know? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models are highly capable systems, but their capabilities and limitations are unclear. |
| Approach: | They develop a benchmark that challenges LLMs to recall all information they possess on specific topics. |
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